I managed to get internet set up in my apartment finally, so now I can blog on Saturday nights. I should be out having fun, I suppose, but... well, I'm not... I guess I can blame the cold for that... or the fact that the Mexican girl I was going to invite somewhere this weekend had a friend in town. Anyway, here's a bit of news analysis:

The Washington Times is a conservative newspaper but this article about the budget has a decidedly disgruntled tone. This is all over the place. Could the deficit issue fell Bush?

I'm having a bit of cognitive dissonance here. I agree with a lot of things conservatives say when they defend Bush. He was being Keynesian, giving a fiscal stimulus to the economy. Homeland security and the liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq ate up a lot of money. And the Democrats would be worse. It's true, the Democrats, though they may raise taxes a bit, are pushing for lots of new programs. On the other hand, they would be hamstrung by a Republican Congress (most likely) so maybe gridlock would carry the day. But get this: if Bush lost re-election because of the deficit, it would set an excellent precedent that would make future presidents afraid to run them.

Bush is already sounding a bit chastened about the deficit. As far as the deficit is concerned, I hope he wins but narrowly, knowing he can't get away with it again.

It's starting to look like Kerry has it bagged. He's leading in the polls in most of the states that vote next week. Dean is behind Edwards. Edwards could win South Carolina, but so what? He's still done for in the general election.

The interesting thing about Kerry is that the press does not like him. Blogger Mickey Kaus is a fierce critic of Kerry. This guy is a Democrat, by the way, but with an independent streak: he favored Schwarzenegger, for example. This quote (a while back) stuck in my memory:

P.P.S.: Some emailers--not many!--have asked about my preferences. Right now,they are, in order: Edwards / Dean / Gephardt / Lieberman / a Bush-Clark tossup / the complete telephone books of all major American cities / Kerry. ...I'm a character voter, not an "issues" voter. Candidates will change their current "issues" positions after the election. New issues will crop up. The best handle we have to predict how a candidate will actually perform in office is character. ...

The press doesn't like Bush, but would Kerry's personal unattractiveness neutralize its usual liberal bias. We will probably get to find out. Lucky us!

BRITISH POLITICS
Viewed from abroad, Tony Blair looks larger than life just about now. The Economist describes Blair's spectacular triumph in his struggle for top-up fees, and then in the Hutton report. An American feels like congratulating the British on conducting their politics in the style of their most famous playwright. (Shakespeare, that is.)

Liberating Iraq was relatively easy for Bush, who always had strong public support in doing what was right. For Blair it was a heroic, all-or-nothing gamble, putting an extremely promising career on the line for the sake of another nation's freedom. The imperial media is a chronic danger to democracies, capable of bending the truth to destroy those who oppose it. Ronald Reagan called them the "lynch mob;" and Blair, too, has experienced their wrath. The British Broadcasting Company did not stop short of implicating him, falsely as it turned out, in the suicide of a scientist, David Kelly. He has now been vindicated, and the BBC received a humiliation.

At the tender age of fifty, Tony Blair is has seven years' tenure as prime minister; he has courage, vision, and integrity (once again proven); he has the right ideas, and presides over the large European economy that persistently performs most impressively; he has outflanked France and Germany diplomatically, and at home has carved out an enviable position for himself in the center of the political spectrum, between unelectable Tories and unelectable Liberal Democrats. He has the greatest stature of any politician in Europe-- almost Napoleonic.

Is Tony Blair somehow *too* brilliant? He's not very popular with the British. This is hard for Americans to understand. If only we had such a brilliant leader! Still, what is his career path now? Britain has no term limits, and no one is well-placed to beat Blair. He has transcended his party, and represents a body of ideas in his own right. Is that appropriate in a democracy? Maybe we Americans should be thankful that George Bush is clumsier, more obviously imperfect. And term-limited.

IMPULSIVE TITLE CHANGE
Why the title of my blog-- "the Party of Lincoln?" That was an impulse born of Bush's immigration proposal, and reinforced by the State of the Union Address. (I'll put a post on that sometime.) The major reasons I liked Bush before were 1) the foreign affairs revolution, and the liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq; 2) compassion, particularly the increase in support for AIDS in Africa and foreign aid generally, and now the desire to help ex-prisoners. Minor reasons: the education plan seems pretty good, I like his move against policy discrimination against religion, I support his veto of Kyoto. The guest-worker proposal was a HUGE point in his favor. I think the Republicans are the Party of Lincoln-- the party of emancipation-- today more than at any time since 1865. On the other hand, I never liked the tax cut. If the guest-worker proposal dies and the election becomes a referendum on the tax cut I'll start feeling a bit over-enthusiastic re-naming my blog to show support for Bush. We'll see.

THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM:
The World Social Forum is about to take place in Mumbai, India. I glanced at the website expecting to hate it, but so far I have been pleasantly surprised. Some of the points in their Charter of Principles I especially liked. Here's a sample:

1) The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Mankind and between it and the Earth.

2) The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localised in time and place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre that "Another World Is Possible", it becomes a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it.

3) The World Social Forum is a world process. All the meetings that are held as part of this process have an international dimension.

4) The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalisation commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations' interests, with the complicity of national governments. They are designed to ensure that globalisation in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all citizens - men and women - of all nations and the environment and will rest on democratic international systems and institutions at the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty of peoples.

10) The World Social Forum is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist views of economy, development and history and to the use of violence as a means of social control by the State. It upholds respect for Human Rights, the practices of real democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, ethnicities, genders and peoples, and condemns all forms of domination and all subjection of one person by another.

George W. Bush was recently successful in "opposing... [the] totalitarian" regime in Iraq and ending once and for all the "use of violence as a means of social control by the [Iraqi] State.]" It cannot be seriously held that "respect for Human Rights" and "the practices of real democracy" could have been brought to the Iraqi people except by military force. So the World Social Forum will surely hold up George W. Bush as Man of the Year, right? On the contrary, they hate him. So we see the WSF has a long way to go to make their positions consistent, but if you recall that this used to be a vehicle of the "anti-globalization" movement, spokesman for an economic know-nothing-ism that would have starved hundreds of millions if practiced, they have made a lot of progress. Hey, can a neoconservative, theoconservative, Bush-backing Republican join in this "reflective thinking... democratic debate of ideas?" Not just yet, but maybe a few years down the line someone will be buying me a ticket to Bombay.

I would bet that Amartya Sen is high on the list of heroes for people at the World Social Forum. But he is also an intelligent man, and therefore resistant to the tremendous silliness of the anti-globalization movement. This essay begins with a delicious note of skepticism about the global opposition to the war in Iraq, and goes on to make a thoughtful argument whose thrust is, to my mind, reminiscent of one of Bush's best remarks in the State of the Union:

We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again. (Applause.)

Sen's essay can be read, I think, as bridging the gap between the neocons and the left. Or, to put it more tendentiously, as revealing that neoconservative idealism captures what the left should be, if it were intelligent and principled, and exorcised of Marxism, hatred, the rationalization of victim complexes, and the other intellectual and moral distortions that have turned the left into a friend of tyrants.

I claim that borders are an unjust institution. See if this article tilts you a little more towards my view. (I hope it's not proprietary...) The "kamikazes of poverty" desperately try to seek a better life. Arrayed against them are the guns of people paid for and appointed by a government that represents you and me. I want to change that. How about you?

DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES:
Still working on the site set-up. Meanwhile, some comments on the Democratic primaries:

John Edwards is by far my favorite candidate. My heart wants him to get the nomination, but that will make the choice difficult next November. I don't want to vote against him, or Bush either.

John Kerry would be a great man to vote against. Great wealth, unseemly ambition, cold personality, mediocre Senate career, the only thing going for him is his military biography. Part of me would be happy to see him get the nomination, because I think he would prove the least electable.

Howard Dean is a liberal bigot, the sort of man who makes me feel unAmerican for being a conservative. His apathy towards the freedom of the Iraqi people is chilling. Yet I find him personally appealing. To see him defeated, to see the position he stands for repudiated by the voters of this country, would be gloriously heart-warming.

IMMIGRATION:
I am a firm believer in open borders. I think the freedom to migrate should, in the course of the next generation, be recognized as a fundamental part of human freedom throughout the world, along with freedom of speech and freedom of religion. I support legal immigration and illegal immigration. Immigration laws are unjust laws and the proper response to them is resolute and highly public civil disobedience. Anyone who wants to come to this country to peacefully earn their living through honest labor will have my help, should they ask for it, even if it violates the "law" (I use the phrase in quotation marks to indicate that I do not consider immigration restrictions to be laws in a moral sense.)

Where does this radical pro-immigration position put me in the next election? I was thrilled when Bush announced his guest-worker proposal-- thrilled and amazed. Pro-immigration proposals are not good politics, because they don't have much public support, though I believe the public could be forced to change its mind if they had to confront this civil-rights issue as they did the civil-rights issues of the 1960s. Bush won my vote and my heart with the move.

But now the Democrats have a counter-proposal. So how does that affect my position?

Well, I'll be watching closely. For now, mostly I'm on the side of Bush. First, the Democrats are being opportunist, and since their bill won't pass, they're not risking much. They just want to be able to say Bush's plan is a "political ploy," and since they don't have a majority, the effect of their noncooperation would be to sink the whole thing and get no guest-worker proposal at all. I don't think the Democrats even want this kind of proposal. Why didn't Clinton make it?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
I bought some books of HTML over the break and am planning to overhaul this site so that the format is more suitable for doing what I want-- a mixture of a running blog with links to longer essays. Hopefully before the end of the month I'll start up again. I've got to say one thing though: THREE CHEERS FOR BUSH'S IMMIGRATION PROPOSAL. I'm thrilled! Never since 1865 have the Republicans so fully been the party of Lincoln, the party of emancipation; first in Afghanistan and Iraq, now for those people who are part of this country and yet had to live in fear of the police. This could be a major triumph for civil rights, even more than the amnesty of 1986 which was only a temporary fix. If it becomes law, Bush has my vote, and let me submit to you that maybe he should get yours too. Anyway, I'll post a link when I'm blogging again. Any readers who stray by the site in the meantime, drop me an e-mail so I can let you know when to come back.